If BIDs Are Such A Good Good Thing For The City Then Why Is Everyone Involved In Their Creation So Darned Secretive?

August 11, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

Laura McLennan, Mike Bonin's Deputy Chief of Staff, who has her story about BID formation and she's sticking to it. — Laura McLennan, Mike Bonin’s Deputy Chief of Staff, who has her story about BID formation and she’s sticking to it.

Ask anybody who’s making bank off BIDs. Ask the BID Consortium. Ask the freaking State Legislature, who has incorporated their findings in the freaking Streets and Highways Code at Section 36601(e)(1). Every zillionaire in the state of California and every zillionaire lackey legislator at every level will tell you that the flipping RAND Corporation Report on BIDs proves that they’re better for the health, wealth, and eternal salvation for the people of the Golden State than the the forthcoming resurrection of Jesus, Mary, and all 12 of the apostles.¹ And yet when it comes to finding out who’s behind creating them, everybody lies, everybody hides.

Here’s the story. The City creates BIDs. This is no secret. When Aaron Epstein changed the world with his lawsuit the court found that yes, the City of Los Angeles created its BIDs. Read through the records from the years of work Jackie Goldberg dedicated in the 1990s to forming a BID in Hollywood. And yet if you ask anyone at the City for any records to do with the preformation of a BID, they will trot out their official story, which is a lie, that BIDs are formed by a spontaneous movement of property owners.² This is what Laura McLennan, Mike Bonin’s Deputy Chief of Staff, told me this morning after I asked her for a copy of the list of property owners in the forthcoming Venice Beach BID. She also told me that CD11 didn’t have the list and that I should ask the City Clerk.

I don’t know if that was meant as bitter sarcasm or was just a symptom of ignorance (although I’d hope that someone as intimately involved with the VBBID formation process as Bonin’s senior staff must be would not suffer from the requisite level of ignorance), but actually I’d already asked the Clerk yesterday, been denied at multiple levels, and that’s why I was asking CD11.³ Staff members of the division that oversees BIDs told me that they didn’t have the list, that they didn’t have anything to do with the list, that the list didn’t have anything to do with the City, and that I could ask the shadowy private consultant who’s running the private side of the process, Tara Devine, for the list. I did ask Devine, even though it was obviously a waste of time to ask someone like Devine for anything she wasn’t obligated to provide by law. And it was a waste of time.
Continue reading If BIDs Are Such A Good Good Thing For The City Then Why Is Everyone Involved In Their Creation So Darned Secretive? →

Municipal Ethics

City Ethics Commissioner, Employee of NBCUniversal’s Lobbying Unit, And Enforcer of the Municipal Lobbying Ordinance Ana Teresa Dahan Argues Against City Lobbying Law Reform Because ” it is through lobbying that [elected officials] get accurate information”

August 11, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

City Ethics Commissioner Ana Dahan: Don't make it too scary to be a lobbyist because otherwise who's going to tell our elected officials the truth about stuff?!?! — City Ethics Commissioner Ana Dahan: Don’t make it too scary to be a lobbyist because otherwise who’s going to tell our elected officials the truth about stuff?!?!

Watch, listen, and learn as City Ethics Commissioner Ana Dahan actually says that we gotta make lobbying easier because “our elected officials have to make a lot of decisions on information that they don’t have an expertise on, and sometimes it is through lobbying that they get accurate information…I just want to make sure that we don’t limit expertise from getting to our elected officials when they’re making decisions…” And in her day job she works for NBCUniversal’s lobbying unit, I suppose providing “accurate information” about “expertise” and other such civically essential activities.

First of all recall that the City Ethics Commission is undertaking a proposal to revise the Municipal Lobbying Ordinance. It seems that they’re required to do this kind of thing on a regular basis by §702(f) of the City Charter. The current law has a complex and practically unenforceable definition of what professional lobbying is and part of the CEC staff’s current proposal is to define it in a way so that people can understand whether or not they’re subject to it. This is a good quality in laws.

And who is Commissioner Ana Dahan? Well, she’s a law student at Loyola and she works for some outfit called NBCUniversal in some unit called “Legal & Government Affairs.” It’s not so easy to discover the responsibilities of that unit, but there are some clues in this biography of Steven Nissen, the “Senior VP of Legal & Government Affairs at NBCUniversal”:

… he is primarily responsible for developing and coordinating for the company a comprehensive state and local government agenda, including anti-piracy, intellectual property protection, tax, digital, broadcast, film production, land use and government compliance.

In other words, one of her bosses oversees NBCUniversal’s lobbying activities. He’s even the immediate past chair of L.A. lobbying behemoth the Central City Association of Los Angeles. The man is deeply involved in local lobbying.

And not only that, but her boss’s boss is Mitch Rose, described by The Hill as NBC’s “top lobbyist.” So that pretty much explains what “Legal & Government Affairs” means at NBCUniversal. It means lobbying.
Continue reading City Ethics Commissioner, Employee of NBCUniversal’s Lobbying Unit, And Enforcer of the Municipal Lobbying Ordinance Ana Teresa Dahan Argues Against City Lobbying Law Reform Because ” it is through lobbying that [elected officials] get accurate information” →

Hypocrisy

Kerry Morrison Says That Sheila Kuehl Blames Supervisors’ Complete Failure to Deal With L.A. County Homelessness On The Brown Act’s Open Meeting Requirements: We Can’t Solve Problems When People Are Watching

August 10, 2016 kohlhaas Leave a comment

If only we didn't have to follow the LAW we would have solved this whole homelessness crisis long ago. — If only we didn’t have to follow the LAW we would have solved this whole homelessness crisis long ago.

Watch and listen here as Kerry Morrison quotes Sheila Kuehl blaming the L.A. County Supervisors’ utter failure to solve our homelessness problem on the fact that the Brown Act requires them to hold open meetings and conduct their deliberations in public (full transcript after the break as always). The message essentially is that the Supervisors can’t get anything done if they have to do it when people are watching. This kind of attitude is, of course, the reason we have to have a Brown Act in the first place. Kerry Morrison’s statements are hearsay, and it’s just as likely that Kerry Morrison, in the throes of her fever dreams of a Hollywood Reich, delusionally attributed this sentiment to Kuehl. We’ll never know at this point.

Readers of this blog are probably pretty familiar with the Brown Act’s requirements. They essentially say that the Supervisors can’t discuss legislative action in secret. They have to do it in public meetings.¹ The law doesn’t restrict the kinds of things they can talk about, it doesn’t restrict the kinds of deals they can make with one another or with third parties. It only requires them to conduct their deliberations and decision-making in public.

So Kerry Morrison’s version of Sheila Kuehl’s position is disconcerting. She claims that Kuehl claims that the Brown Act prevents the Supervisors from eliminating homelessness because “…they can’t converse with each other. You can’t horse-trade votes. … You know, so you can’t collaborate, you know, can we all agree on what we’re all gonna…you have to do it all in open session, and it’s very cumbersome…” The idea seems to be that the supervisors can’t have an honest discussion in public, so they can’t have any discussion at all.

Kerry Morrison doesn’t elaborate, probably because the authoritarian world-view inherent in this statement is so comforting, so familiar to her. If you’re one of those who think that it’s more important that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth than it is to have the goddamned Red Line running on time you may have trouble following the argument, though.
Continue reading Kerry Morrison Says That Sheila Kuehl Blames Supervisors’ Complete Failure to Deal With L.A. County Homelessness On The Brown Act’s Open Meeting Requirements: We Can’t Solve Problems When People Are Watching →

Miscellaneous

LAHSA’s Erroneous Zombie Eleven Percent Increase in City Homeless Population Resurrected in Two Recent Council Motions Despite May 2016 Retraction

August 9, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

Bob Blumenfield, Councilmember from CD3, providing yet another example of how hard it is to find good staff.

Earlier this year LAHSA announced with much fanfare and gnashing of the old dental protrusions that the homeless population of the City of Los Angeles had increased by 11% year over year. Well, in May Eric Garcetti pointed out that math is hard and after a bunch of frantic recalculations as reported in the Times here everyone, Garcetti’s office and LAHSA in the person of E.D. Peter Lynn, settled on a revised figure of about a 5% increase in the City.

But then in June 2016 Hillel Aron used the 11% figure in the L.A. Weekly, although he retracted it promptly when the error was pointed out to him.¹ and I thought that would be the end of it. However, this past week brought us two new Council files supplementary to the Homelessness Crisis file. These are CF 15-1138-S12, moved by Curren Price and Marqueece Harris-Dawson and CF 15-1138-S13, moved by Bob Blumenfield and Harris-Dawson again. And both motions (S12 and S13) cite the erroneous 11% figure for some reason. There are some red faces on the fourth floor of 200 N. Spring Street this morning, friends!
Continue reading LAHSA’s Erroneous Zombie Eleven Percent Increase in City Homeless Population Resurrected in Two Recent Council Motions Despite May 2016 Retraction →

Featured, Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, The Race Card

Business Improvement Districts As A Force For White Supremacy in Twenty-First Century Los Angeles

August 8, 2016 Mike 2 Comments

This is the most obvious and least dangerous form in which white supremacy expresses itself.

My colleagues and I spill a lot of metaphorical ink referring to business improvement districts and their Boards of Directors as white supremacists, and we certainly stand by that position. However, it’s recently come to my attention that not everyone in our audience is familiar with the literal meaning of the phrase. Evidently it strikes some people as a generic, semantically empty insult, or else they’re confused by the fact that the phrase refers to at least two fairly distinct ideologies. Thus I thought it would be useful to explain in detail why BIDs are in a very literal sense white supremacist organizations.

First let’s get the definitions straight. As always, our friends at Wikipedia give us a good starting place. Their article on white supremacy tells us that the phrase has two principal meanings. The salient one for our purposes is that white supremacy is:

…a political ideology that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical and/or industrial domination by white people

It’s crucial to note that there’s nothing inherently racist about this kind of white supremacy.¹ Now, the history of the racial segregation of real estate in Los Angeles is well-known, and Hollywood was at the forefront of it from the early years of the last century. What’s not so well understood is how racially segregated the commercial real estate market was. In fact² it was certainly more segregated than residential real estate, since white people owned much of the commercial real estate even in areas of the City where nonwhites were allowed to own houses.³ Continue reading Business Improvement Districts As A Force For White Supremacy in Twenty-First Century Los Angeles →

Business Improvement Districts

Newly Obtained Media District Security Logs Show Anti-Food-Coalition Hysteria To Be Even More Utterly Unfounded Than Previously Suspected

August 8, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

A 2014 surveillance photo of the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition feeding at Sycamore and Romaine.

I recently obtained about 140 hand-written daily logs prepared by the Hollywood Media District BID’s security guards. These are also available via Archive.Org, which has the advantage that the whole set can be downloaded using BitTorrent. The set is not complete, and it mostly comprises swing shift logs, but I didn’t select these at all. I just scanned them in the order in which they were provided to me.

It’s been known for a while now that Universal Protection Service has carried out a years-long surveillance operation against the Media District’s perennial bête noire, the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition, looking for any evidence whatsoever to use in the NIMBY neighbors, the City government, and the BID’s crazed campaign against them, their byzantine conspiracies with the LAPD and others in City Government, their allies’ unavailing 2011 lawsuit against the Food Coalition, and so on. These logs are interesting because they expose some contextually surprising results of this surveillance, namely that the intersection of Sycamore and Romaine seems to be the safest area in the entire Media District BID. Despite the intense, hours-long nightly surveillance, nothing illegal ever seems to happen there. Some samples follow. Note that these are also unselected. They comprise all swing shift logs from February 2016 that mention the Coalition’s food truck at all. They’re representative, too, in the sense that the pattern holds across all the logs I looked at:
Continue reading Newly Obtained Media District Security Logs Show Anti-Food-Coalition Hysteria To Be Even More Utterly Unfounded Than Previously Suspected →

Hollywood BID Patrol, The Race Card

BID Patrol Allegedly Uses the Word “Wetback,” Offending Everybody Except Possibly Anti-Peruvian Director Carol Massie and Graffiti-Art-Haters on Staff and Board

August 8, 2016 kohlhaas Leave a comment

This is not exactly like the BID Patrol. They don't carry rifles, for one thing. — This is not exactly like the BID Patrol. They don’t carry rifles, for one thing.

We’ve been writing a lot recently on what strongly appears to be an anti-Latino attitude on the part of the two business improvement districts controlled by Kerry Morrison. The first indication of this was their freakout over the too-dark skin color of local nightclub patrons. After that it turned out that they think that official acknowledgement of Peruvian culture in Hollywood would be “amazingly inappropriate.” Also, both BIDs design their public art contests in such a way that the chance of a Latino artist being selected is significantly lowered, with both the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance and the Central Hollywood Coalition being guilty of this.

So against that background it wasn’t all too surprising to read this 2015 complaint to Kerry Morrison from an anonymous person:
Continue reading BID Patrol Allegedly Uses the Word “Wetback,” Offending Everybody Except Possibly Anti-Peruvian Director Carol Massie and Graffiti-Art-Haters on Staff and Board →

Municipal Ethics

City Ethics Commission Prepares to Revamp Lobbying Laws; Proposal Builds, Improves on Version Torpedoed in 2010 by Unholy Threesome Consisting of Kerry Morrison, Carol Schatz, and Eric Garcetti

August 3, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

Jessica Levinson, president of the City Ethics Commission, star Lawprof at Loyola, and righteous local media darling.

If you’ve read the Municipal Lobbying Ordinance of the City of Los Angeles, you will have noted that it’s a bitch to enforce. It defines a lobbyist to be someone who is compensated to influence City action on behalf of a third party for 30 or more hours in any consecutive three months, and then requires lobbyists so-defined to register with the City. Imagine trying to use CPRA and other methods available to the public to pin that beef on some BID employee… I can tell you it’s not an easy task.

You may recall that between 2008 and 2010 the CEC tried to get this unwieldy definition changed to one whose details I won’t go into here, but which would have been far easier to enforce. For whatever reason, Carol Schatz, Kerry Morrison, and a few less luminous lights of the BID world including the perennially mockable Downtown Russell Brown decided for reasons known only to them and their therapists that this was going to destroy the very foundations of Los Angeles. As is their wont, they proceeded to get really fussy and ~~scratch at their own faces till mom made them put their mittens on~~ soon Eric Garcetti, at that time chair of the Rules and Elections Committee, smothered the whole baby in its bed for no discernible reason other than to please his darling BID-babes Kerry and Carol.

Eric Garcetti to Kerry Morrison in 2010: "You don't want to have to register as a lobbyist? Whatever baby wants, baby gets." Except, of course, baby still has to register, it's just next to impossible to prove it. — Eric Garcetti to Kerry Morrison in 2010: “You don’t want to have to register as a lobbyist? Whatever baby wants, baby gets.” Except, of course, baby still has to register, it’s just next to impossible to prove it.

So now the staff of the CEC, whose Executive Director is the same Heather Holt who got tarred, feathered, and mocked by Garcetti over this very same issue in 2010, has prepared a new proposed revision of the definition of lobbyist. The Commissioners will be discussing it at their upcoming meeting on August 9, 2016. The new proposal owes some debts to the last proposal, but its central point is quite different. It’s a change to a compensation-based rather than a time-based definition, which is fairly standard around the rest of the country:

We recommend returning to a compensation-based definition and that “lobbyist” be defined as an individual who is entitled to receive $2,000 or more in a calendar year for attempting to influence a City matter on behalf of another person. The attempt to influence would include a direct communication with a City official or employee, and compensation could be either monetary or non-monetary.

Continue reading →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

An Open Letter to Mitch O’Farrell Regarding Signal Box Art in the Hollywood Entertainment District

August 3, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

Thus it’s hard to understand why it’s not good enough to appear on the signal boxes of Hollywood.

See here and here for the background to this post.

Dear Councilmember O’Farrell,

As you may already be aware, the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance is presently holding a competition to choose artwork to adorn signal boxes in the Hollywood Entertainment District, which they contract with the City of Los Angeles to administer. As you know, the L.A. Department of Transportation requires your approval for this project to move forward. I am writing to ask you to withhold your consent from the HPOA’s plan pending a revision of their stated rules which, regardless of the intent, have the effect of significantly lowering the chance that Latino artists working in some of our most vibrant local traditions will be chosen for this honor.

The problem is that the BID’s stated requirements for submissions include the proviso that “NO Cartoon Images or Graffiti work of any kind will be considered.”¹ Graffiti art and cartoon styles are associated in L.A. with Latino, especially Mexican-American artists. Work by Los Angeles artists in these genres has brought world renown, not just to the artists themselves, but to our City. Thus it’s hard to understand why it’s not good enough to appear on the signal boxes of Hollywood. The mystery only deepens when one considers that the HPOA’s requirements also state that “Text Art” will be given full consideration, as if Graffiti art were not also “Text Art.”
Continue reading An Open Letter to Mitch O’Farrell Regarding Signal Box Art in the Hollywood Entertainment District →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, The Race Card

Not Only Does the Central Hollywood Coalition Hate Latino Art Genres, They Also Don’t Want Peruvians Getting Too Comfy in Hollywood. Jittery Little Psychopath Carol Massie: “Seems Amazingly Inappropriate.”

August 1, 2016 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Sarah Besley, erstwhile bossette of the Central Hollywood Coalition, in 2014, fewer than 20 months after she and her minions torpedoed Peru Village.

The Hollywood heroes at Peru Village L.A. held a marvy little festival yesterday across the street from MK.org secret headquarters, which prompted us to break out this story, which we’ve been sitting on for years. Well, not just the festival, but the recent revelations that not only does the HPOA hate mainstream Mexican-American artistic styles, but our councilman, Mitch O’Farrell, who by his own account has “a solid reputation of improving the quality of life for constituents in the 13th Council District,” approves of the anti-Latino-art dog whistlings of the Central Hollywood Coalition. So tonight get ready to hear about how they all have it in for our local Peruvian community as well.

Here’s the back-story. In 2012, a bunch of local Peruvian-Americans in CD13 got a council file started in an attempt to get Vine Street between Melrose and Sunset designated “Peru Village.” This makes some sense because, e.g., there are about five Peruvian restaurants along there, including Mario’s Seafood, which has some of the most astonishing fried chicken in the United States, and Los Balcones, both of which are numbered among the finest restaurants of any variety in our City. So they sent a bunch of really cute kids around to knock on doors and they ended up collecting over 500 signatures from people in the neighborhood.¹ If you’re not familiar with Los Angeles politics, it’s worth noting that actual city council elections can easily be decided by 500 votes. For mere neighborhood renaming this is a landslide.

Double jeopardy: PERUVIAN GRAFFITI. File under things that will NEVER appear in Hollywood ever ever ever if jittery little psychopath and SVBID founding member Carol Massie has her say, and she will have it, won't she? — Double jeopardy: PERUVIAN GRAFFITI. File under things that will NEVER appear in Hollywood ever ever ever if jittery little psychopath and SVBID founding member Carol Massie has her say, and she will have it, won’t she?

But then in February 2013, jittery little psychopath and Hollywood McDonald’s Queen Carol Massie got wind of the plan and popped off this little slab of characteristically jittery psychopathy, in which she swizzlingly pours forth the toxic product of her unchecked anorectic id thusly, proving that she not only hates America and also hates dark-skinned Hollywood club patrons, but that she also has something against Peruvians:

I am a founding member of the Sunset/Vine Business Improvement District which includes this “Peru Village” area. Not only have I never heard of this petition but we, as business owners, work very hard to make Sunset Boulevard and the famous Sunset & Vine corner a place that people from all over the world² view as an integral part of Hollywood. Peru Village would include the Cinerama Dome,³ a Hollywood icon, among others, which seems amazingly inappropriate.

Note that she never says WHY it seems amazingly inappropriate. Perhaps her laser-like zillionaire mental powers tell her that the Cinerama Dome is completely disjoint from all things Peruvian. Or maybe she just made it up, which would be completely in character for Carol Massie.
Continue reading →